Still here 8 August 2009

Cup Plant blooms, sunlit on 27 July

I’m still here.  As those of you that personally know me already know, personal issues have kept me busy of late.  Today was the first day in a while that I got to spend much time in the garden.  The nursery lost so much business in our extremely cold, rainy June that they’ve already brought out their “buy one get one free” sale on all but the largest perennials, so I recently bought some more plants there, and today I planted most of them.  One was the relatively new echinacea, ‘Fragrant Angel,’ which is a creamy color somewhere between soft cream and lemon yellow, and while it is a bit fragrant, it is not as fragrant as its name might lead you to believe.  (Here is one of many pages about it on the web, which also notes the lack of strong fragrance, which many gardeners find important to note as many catalogs make it sound like it’s ridiculously fragrant.)  It was originally quite expensive, about twice the price of their regular perennials (maybe even a bit more), but I got it at regular perennial price in their sale, which quite pleased me, and to be honest, was the biggest reason I bought it instead of buying one of the other echinaceas in the sale.  Though I did also like its off-white color to provide some contrast to my three pure white echinaceas.  Even though I didn’t have any more space near them after planting the several more smaller-potted echinaceas I already got earlier this summer, and thus it is off by itself, though with its more daisy-like appearance than other echinaceas’ lowered petals (also noted at the link), perhaps it is best it’s closer to the shasta daisy than to the rest of its clan.

Anyhow, I also planted another hyssop (much larger in size than the three already in the garden, and blooming, unlike them), two more perennial salvias (Salvia nemerosa to be specific; ‘Blue Hill’ and a deep rose one which is a nice complement to all the mauve and pale pink flowers in the garden, as I have a tendency to pick those latter two shades of pink), another agastache, another rock cress, another pineapple sage, and…I think something else.  I also transplanted a mountain mint and the lemon verbena.  It’s been so windy this summer that the tall plants near the ‘wind tunnel’ are pretty much permanently on severe tilt (some at ninety degree angles or more!), and thus are shading the lemon verbena more than it otherwise would have been, so I hope its new home is sunnier.   I also finally FINALLY planted the poor front-garden dahlias (3 ‘Winsome,’ which is probably my favorite glad, as well as 1 each of ‘Thomas Edison,’ ‘Juanita,’ ‘Prince Noir,’ ‘Jersey’s Beauty,’ and ‘Kidd’s Climax,’ all from Old House Gardens)  – all of them are more heat-tolerant than most dahlias, which typically prefer the warm-but-not-hot days and cool nights of their originating land), and at the bottom of the box I’d been storing them in, discovered a gladiola that had been unwittingly buried beneath them (‘Atom,’ also from OHG, as are my other glads) and so planted it with the other short glads.  The glads have been growing quite vigorously in the warmer weather and the sporadic deep rains and with the manure mulch, but they haven’t budded yet.  Many other gardens have blooming glads now, though, although I imagine they planted theirs before I did.  I see more gardens with glads every year here and I am happy to see them coming somewhat back into fashion after decades out of style in gardens.  I also see the gorgeous huge blooms for sale at the farmers’ market every year now, which makes me happy too.   Anyway, I then used the last of the manure to mulch the dahlias and glad ‘Atom.’  I’ve still got the rest of the dahlias to plant in the back garden, which is often 10 degrees F colder (sometimes more) than the front garden on summer days.

In addition to ‘Atom,’ the glads I’m growing are:  ‘Apricot Lustre,’ ‘Bibi,’ ‘Elvira,’ ‘Fidelio,’ ‘Friendship,’ ‘Lucky Star,’ ‘Melodie,’ ‘Spic and Span,’ ‘Violet Queen,’ and ‘White Friendship’ (the last one isn’t on OHG’s website any more, but I suppose the name is pretty self-explanatory – it’s a white version of ‘Friendship’).  That sounds like a lot, but like with the dahlias, with several of them, I only planted one corm.  Also like the dahlias, I planted them in clumps with two to four types in each clump.  (I also tend to do this with hardy bulbs, though in those cases, they aren’t always the same species.)  I base my clumpings loosely on color, height/size, and bloom time.

One of my mums and one of my asters are already blooming, as has been common in other gardens in recent weeks.  I don’t know if it was the gloomy weather or the cold weather, or a combination of both, that triggered their early bloom.  (Some people posit that it’s short day length that triggers the fall-blooming flowers; others posit that it’s colder temperatures.  As far as I know, nobody has yet proven which is true, or whether for some plants it is a combination of both.)  Both of my blooming ones typically bloom in September here, sometimes into October, and some asters start blooming in October.  I’ve noted that most of my other asters and some of my other mums, as well as some of my goldenrods, are also already budded up.  In some gardens literally all of the mums or asters are already blooming; in many cases they began by mid-July.  It is odd to see so many of them blooming now here, and I find it sad that the autumn flower display, normally so gorgeous here in New England, will be somewhat less than normal.

My scarlet runner beans have grown rampantly this summer – many of the vines are eight feet now – and then this week they abruptly finally started to bloom.  So far the species (Scarlet Runner Bean) and cultivar ‘Painted Lady’ are blooming.  I suppose it is not surprising to hear that scarlet runner bean has scarlet flowers.  ‘Painted Lady’ has flowers that are half a bit of a softer red and half white.  They are climbing tall poles together (though not tall enough for them, but really, who would want to get out a ladder and harvest beans at nine feet anyway?) and look quite pretty blooming together.  My other runner beans are not as rampant (though in fairness, they are not supposed to be) though they have been growing strongly as well; they have yet to bloom.  Many of my other beans (garden beans, not runner beans) are blooming now as well; the purple ones are still blooming in shades of purple, and have been joined by other bean flowers in shades of yellow, white, and cream.   The peas died in the heat wave we recently had, but astonishingly to me, some of the fava/broad beans survived and have begun putting out new flowers now that it is comparably cooler (mid-70s today, but low 80s in recent days) and sunny again.  This is by far the longest they have ever lived for me in this climate.  My tomatoes have grown a lot (finally!) but still haven’t flowered.  The cucumber dropped its second cucumber as well, but has two more cucumbers forming (they formed before it dropped the second one).  As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never grown a cucumber before.  It seems to dislike wildly inconsistent temperatures/weather.  Unfortunately we’ve had those a lot here this year.  Probably more than usual.  A high of 60 F was not uncommon for us earlier this summer, though that would have been quite uncommon in past years!

Hello from New Mexico! 27 July 2008

Greetings!  I am spending the evening recovering from jetlag, so i thought it would be the perfect time to upload a few of my most recent photos (hopefully older ones will be forthcoming, though not necessarily while I am away).  The below ones are all from the 25th.

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) remains a bee favorite!

There is a second bud just starting to open on the lower right.  I don’t know if this is a cultivar as I got it at last year’s estate sale simply labelled “purple coneflower”.  The bean patch is in the background.

Another shot:

The same bee enjoyed Echinacea purpurea ‘White Swan’ (given as a gift by a mail-order company this spring) as well:

The coneflower I got at the estate sale, simply labelled “white coneflower” (cultivar unknown), is the bloom ripening on the right.  (Its petals have turned from white to cream as it ages.)

Bud on unknown sunflower

Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’

I planted this in the spring, as some of you may recall.  I have been so beyond pleased with it.  It started blooming earlier than the species anise hyssop (I believe it is a hybrid between the species anise hyssop and another native hyssop) and just keeps going and going and going.  And bees love it just as much as the species anise hyssop!

In the background are the species anise hyssop (smaller similar bloomstalks in the lower left), rose campion ‘Gardener’s World’ STILL blooming after at least six weeks (magenta rose-shaped blooms on right), and other things.

Ironweed buds swelling (easier to see if you click for the larger version of the photo)

I bet the ironweed blooms while I’m away.  That’s the Maximillian sunflower in front of it; it opened its first few blooms in the couple days before I left.  I’m so proud of the ironweed for having adapted to the dry, windy site.  It wilted a lot in its first weeks there and I was wondering if I’d made a mistake in thinking it could survive such tough conditions, but it’s done so beautifully that it’s now putting up new stalks from its roots.

Hardy marjoram (really an oregano) delicately blooming behind (blurry in foreground) centaurea ‘Colchester White’.

I’ve never grown this centaurea (a tender one) before and I really like it.  Its silvery leaves light up this area of the garden and it looks great with coreopsis ‘Zagreb’ (which has been blooming beside another of its arching leaf sprays).

The unknown plant (the one I couldn’t even find in any of my charts or notes from last year, but was sure I’d intentionally planted at some point) has indeed turned out to be a patrinia as I suspected. This was unfortunately my best picture.  That’s one of the cardinal climbers winding in around it; the cardinal climber outgrew its pole and started winding back and forth between the patrinia stalks.  It helps them stay steadier in the wind.

It has done astonishingly well (and this despite being damaged by both of this summer’s hailstorms) and the tallest bloomstalk is now about five feet and getting closer to surpassing my own height each day. It is BELOVED by small pollinators – I see at least one on it each time I walk by, no matter what the weather – and just before I left I saw a huge wasp, a kind that catches and eats prey we humans consider “pests”, nectaring at it as well.   Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’ (just behind the patrinia) and Echinacea purpurea (vivid in background) share this shot.

Globe thistle finishing blooming (left) with a bloom of sunflower ‘Vanilla Ice’ (right).  Globe thistle is another bee favorite.

Agastache cana ‘Heather Queen’ in foreground; hybrid agastache ‘Acapulco Orange’ floriferous in background (another unbelievably outstanding performer this year!).  ‘Heather Queen’ and ‘Acapulco Orange’ are both supposed to survive winters in my USDA zone (allegedly 6B), so we’ll see if they actually do.  (Agastaches, like dianthus and lavenders, tend to survive better in drier winter climates, though. My garden is unusual in better mimicking Mediterranean climates than typical Northeastern North America gardens, so more lavenders and dianthus survive for me than generally do for others in my area.)

I had seen bumblebees occasionally try to feed from my long, tubular agastaches that are so heartily recommended for hummingbirds (my four cultivars this year are the hardy ‘Acapulco Orange’ and ‘Heather Queen’ and the tender ‘Summer Breeze’ and ‘Apricot Sprite’) and they had given up, so I’d figured you needed to be tiny (I’d seen very small pollinators simply crawl into the bloom) or have a long feeding mechanism (like a hummingbird or a butterfly) to be able to successfully gather nectar.  But then a day or two before I left, I saw something fascinating:  a bumblebee figured out how to feed from them, and since almost no other insect is doing it in my garden, spent at least fifteen minutes wandering from bloom to bloom and stalk to stalk gathering the pollen from such a rich, nearly untouched source.  It would stick its head right in the bloom, looking for all the world like it was stuck in a Venus fly trap.  It would spend an average of thirty seconds stuck partway into the bloom, and then would pull itself out and move on to a new bloom.  Bees are so interesting to me!  I find their learning process fascinating, and am very curious as to what the difference is between different ones – why some figure one thing out and others don’t, why some try a new-to-them flower and others don’t (and why some try harder than others to figure out how to eat at a new flower), why some seem to favor certain colored flowers or certain species of flowers, etc.

Lantana ‘Red Spread’

I’ve never tried this one before.  So far I like it.  Lavenders shown behind it (providing nice foliage & bloom contrast).

Some photos 8 June 2008

It had been so long since I felt this 3-H weather (hazy hot humid) that I had forgotten how the air can feel like a weight – like it’s pressing down on you, causing you to carry yourself lower to the ground than you do in ordinary air. The haze is so thick that sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a thunderstorm is coming or if it’s just the day’s air.  As of this writing, the heat index is 101 F.

Here are some pictures.

Fava blooming yesterday

(Blooms seen from behind in this shot)  That is an ant on it. For some reason the ants have been fascinated with the favas since they were wee things.  They trek up and down them, to no apparent purpose.  I have no idea why.

One way to work with a small gardening space is to make everything closer together than recommended.  Here’s an example.  Beans are sprouting amongst the base of pea plants while Aztec sweet herb winds around them and some of the hollyhocks.

Aztec sweet herb (Lippia dulcis) is something I’ve never grown before, or indeed even knew existed until I saw the nursery selling it this year in their effort to offer a wider variety of herbs and specialty annuals than they have in the past.  The herbs have a very pleasant sweet scent when rubbed, and I find the viney plant attractive.  At the nursery small pollinators and predators were attracted to the small button-like flowers, which I wasn’t surprised about, but so far in the garden they seem to be going for more familiar food sources.  Though its leaves are, from what I’ve read, edible, it is apparently not much used as a sweetener any more.  I just thought it was a pretty plant, and thought it would look nice twining around the bases of the crop plants. According to what I’ve read so far, it was used medicinally starting in the time of the Aztecs if not before to treat various respiratory issues, but I haven’t found any information on current uses, much less how to prepare it (tea? tincture? fresh? dried? etc.). Perhaps its medicinal uses have gone by the wayside like its use as a sweetener, or perhaps relevant information isn’t written in English.

Yesterday while I was taking photos, there was an American Bumblebee that was obsessed with the sundial lupine blooms.

And another shot, this time of the other open bloom:

As I mentioned in a post on Wednesday, I got three sunflowers at the farmers’ market this week. I planted them on Friday (the 6th) so that they wouldn’t have to try to survive the then-incoming heat wave in their little peat pots.  Here is one of them, in focus in the foreground of the below shot:

Also in the shot (clockwise from the bottom left) are a bellflower (new this year), the Carolina lupine/false lupine, scallions, one of the tender salvias, sea holly, two small things in the same area (a tall verbena just starting to earn its name, and the edge of a young bean plant [I think it’s a runner bean]), and the ‘Butterfly Blue’ delphinium that I got from the flower farm at the first farmers’ market.  The farmers sure were right about it loving heat and full sun!  I’m so surprised after thinking of delphiniums as such delicate little things that need lots of coddling and still often don’t even survive a year here.

The chive blooms finally opened!

California poppy bloom

The echinaceas are budding up.  Here’s one (I think it’s the one that I got last year that was just labelled as “white coneflower” – not sure if it’s a white cultivar of Echinacea purpurea or something else) with the unusual, delicate bloom of the American alumroot (Heuchera americana) that I planted this spring.

In the foreground are foliage of a California poppy, buds of an agastache (lit by the sun), and a little hardy geranium I got at this year’s historical society estate sale.

Farmers’ market salad from earlier this week –

Three kinds of lettuce, spinach, radishes, baby garlic (used like scallions), red onion.  The only things not from the market were the red onion slices and the salad dressing I added after taking this picture. I love eating food fresh from the market and/or the garden.  I can often literally taste the difference!

More photos coming.

Erodium, echinacea, felicia, borage, & lupines (false & otherwise) 3 May 2008

More photos taken on the 1st –

Erodium (Heronsbill/Storksbill) – sorry this was the best shot of the lot.

Apparently it’s popular to give water bird names to hardy geraniums and their relatives. Hardy geraniums are often referred to as “Cranesbills” and this daintier relative is commonly called “Heronsbill” or “Storksbill”. This definitely does not seem to be a very common perennial as yet, as it took me some time to even find the right kind of Erodium on Google; apparently a much more common member of the genus is an annual weed in mild climates. I don’t remember my nursery selling erodium till this year, but this year the nursery manager recommended it as a good plant for my windy, sloped, sunny, poor-soil front garden, so I’m giving it a go. Bluestone Perennials sells a different cultivar than the one I planted and their page for it has more information on this type of Erodium (as well as a better photo of the flowers than my above photo, which was the best of a couple dozen I’ve taken; for some reason small white flowers don’t tend to photograph well on my camera). As I’ve previously found with many other plants that are originally from mountainous areas, it has been budding/blooming much more since our two days of rain.

Echinaceas and felicia

I got these echinaceas at that same annual herb sale at the estate run by the historical society that I’ve referenced in other posts (the sale was in April 2007, the same time I started this garden, and a nice cheap way to get some perennials). They were young when I bought them, and while I was slightly disappointed that they didn’t bloom their first year, I wasn’t very surprised. They were simply marked as “purple coneflower” and “white coneflower,” so I don’t know if they are cultivars or not. The one on the left is the allegedly purple one (purple coneflower – Echinacea purpurea – gets its common name from the Latin, like many other purple-called plants, as people often mistakenly think purpurea means “purple”; in actuality it’s more like “crimson”) and the one on the right is the white one, of which I have no idea if it’s a hybrid or what else, due to the low-info tag and its not having bloomed yet. I did notice this spring at the nursery that the purple coneflowers there came up before the white ones, just like in my own garden, and that the purple ones’ leaves started out bronzy-green while the white ones’ leaves started out a medium green, again just like in my own garden. (You can still see the difference in color in the young leaves pictured here.)

As to the felicia (the pictured one is one of twelve young felicias planted around the front garden), I had never grown felicia (as far as I recall) before last year, when its succulent-looking leaves at the nursery made me think it was well-suited to a hot, dry, windy, xeriscaped garden. After planting it, I read up on it and discovered that, while my guess was a fair one, it wasn’t really accurate, and felicia doesn’t take to hot temperatures as well as one might think from looking at it. Upon this discovery, I resigned myself to losing the plant I’d bought by late summer, but I turned out to be wrong (one reason why I suggest trial and error in addition to outside ideas). It certainly looked scraggly for a while, but it recovered and started blooming fiercely again, keeping going till frost. My favorite felicia so far is the one that I grew last year, a beautiful light blue daisy-type flower with a bright yellow center, the flowers giving the appearance of tiny clear skies with tiny suns in the center of each tiny sky.

Borage

[Hardy mum sprouts in the foreground; peas sprouting in the background]

I did some poking about for this post, refreshing myself on what the online literature says about borage. Much of it seems to be inaccurate, particularly about borage’s culture. Yes, it’s true that it prefers rich soil, but that’s about the only thing I could find that was accurate. For one thing, many sites said that borage’s top height is 18 inches. In the rich soil of an old garden of mine, it was a towering plant backed by a fence, perhaps reaching three feet and being smothered in blooms for at least three to four months. I’ve also read repeatedly today to absolutely not plant borage in a windy site as it will flop over and die. I’m glad I didn’t read that before growing it last year, as I’ve shown its inaccuracy. It helps if the prevailing wind is partially broken by a bigger, more wind tolerant plant, but I’ve found that to be true of a large number of the things I’ve planted in the front garden. Finally, as the picture above proves, transplanting a plant is not in fact as dire as the online literature claims (apparently it’s supposed to be impossible) and the plants are not as frost-averse as claimed. Yes, certainly, the younger a plant you can transplant, the better, but then, I’ve found that to also be true of many plants.

Anyway, as you can find copious references to online, in addition to being a great nectar source and a medicinal herb, borage is edible as just-plain-food, with the leaves generally being described as reminiscent of cucumbers and the flowers also edible (as always, be sensible – triple-check things you’ve heard/read and be especially sure that you are unlikely to have an allergic or averse reaction and/or contraindication to any food or herb BEFORE attempting to consume it – think of medicinal herbs as being like pharmaceutical medications).

Carolina lupine/False lupine (Thermopsis villosa) starting to bud

When I was a child I did not know what lupines/lupins were. They did not grow wild nearby there (not even in the public nature parks, as far as I ever saw) and no gardeners I knew attempted to grow the dainty, easily felled cultivars in their gardens because of our hot, humid summers. It wasn’t till, as a teen, I watched the Monty Python skit about the man who steals lupines to give to the indigent that I discovered what a lupine looks like. Lupines grow wild by the huge armful up in Northern New England, but down here, even in this area cooler than my childhood one, they still tend to die out in summertime or be killed by the intermittent snowcover of winter. In a past garden, I successfully grew the East Coast’s native (and endangered or eradicated in many states, partially because it will cross-breed with garden-planted lupine cultivars) lupine, Lupinus perennis, commonly known as “sundial lupine”. While I’d like to try again, lupines – like many wildflowers with either deep taproots or fragile thin root systems – are not the most easily transplanted plants, and there are not that many sources for sundial lupine, so I have yet to do it.

In the meantime, I’ve been growing the plant I’d love to go back in time and tell the gardeners I knew as a child about, the one faking being a lupine, with sunshiny yellow blooms brightening up the late spring garden, and a plant which laughs at humidity – the Carolina lupine or false lupine. This lovely, underrated plant is native to the Southeastern US and is a quite worthy garden plant. Over the course of its first couple years it will expend much of its energy establishing itself in the garden, after which it will be a subshrub – often reaching 4 feet or more in height and sprawling 2-3 feet across, smothered in its beautiful yellow lupine-like blooms for a month in late spring and/or early summer. Depending on what source you check, the coldest USDA zone can be anywhere from zone 4 to 6. I’ve never had any problems with it winter-killing despite us having sometimes had highs below zero F with dessicating winds and no snow cover at the time, so I’d say it’s probably hardier than the most conservative estimates, but please do bear in mind that a better established plant is always going to be more likely to survive any adversity, so if you live in a harsh-winter area I suggest planting it in spring to give it the best chance of winter survival its first year.